Feature: Option for natural reading order of timeline

[politas]

Facebook, Twitter, they all got us accustomed to this bizarre practice of reading timelines backwards, so newer posts are above older ones.

Could we please have an option to have the newer entries in the timeline at the bottom, so we can read without constantly scrolling in opposite directions?

If viewing on a small screen and wanting to read posts in the sequence they are posted, we have to scroll up to the top of a post, then scroll down to read the post, then scroll up to the start of the next post. For those of us that normally read text top to bottom, it would be better to be able to start at the top and simply scroll down if we want to read posts in sequence. This is especially the case for users with limited visual capability who increase the font size for easier reading.

This feature request is not related to any issues with the timeline as it is. Is it specifically about providing an option to reverse the presented order of posts.

Please do not close this feature request as "completed" (such as in #281) unless it is actually completed. Fixing any random "issue with the timeline" will not magically provide this feature. IF you want to reject this idea, please have the courtesy to mark it as such when you close it.

[grishka]

I misunderstood that one. I thought that you meant that it's hard to read posts in their natural order when there are gaps in the timeline, so I closed it when I made the gap load in the direction in which you are scrolling.

Now that I understand what you mean, it seems bizarre to me, because in most UIs where some kind of content you received is displayed, it's sorted from newest to oldest. Emails, conversation list in chat apps, downloaded files in web browsers, notifications in both Android and iOS, GitHub issues, etc. The only one example I can come up with where it does work like you say is chats themselves some messaging apps, for example Telegram, where chats open where you last left off and you see newer messages as you scroll down. I've never seen that done for social media, however.

[politas]

Well, it seems bizarre to me that every single social media app has adopted the reverse order and everyone has just accepted it as normal. I'm certainly not the only person who wants to read things in the order they are posted, as we can see in the thread view both within Mastodon and Reddit, for instance.

I suppose it depends on how many people you are following and how involved they are with each other. If you're following thousands of accounts, there's no consistency to the conversation, so it doesn't matter what order things come in. If you have a tightly focused follow list of people that are regularly interacting with each other, or responding to external events, reading the feed in order from oldest to newest makes a lot of sense.

[kallekn]

It all depends on how you use social media. On my phone I very much prefer reading Mastodon in the natural order, oldest to newest. That can be done on Pachli for Android, and on Mona for iPhone. In the olden times there were some Twitter clients that could do that as well.

Especially with long posts and threads this is a lot better, as you don't need to scroll back and forth. I think this should be a selectable feature for all clients, and also the web interface.

[zagor]

Oldest-first has been the default for all text for hundreds of years. Twitter flipped it as a gimmick.

Remember books? Newspapers? Discord, slack, usenet, irc, email, forums, blogs, guestbooks, you name it. To call this "bizarre" is highly myopic.

What is actually bizarre is enforcing a completely unnecessary eye-and-scroll-dance on everyone simply trying to read linear text. It's as bizarre as printing a book in reverse with the first paragraph on the bottom of the last page.